D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  But before American seamen and airmen gained the upper hand in November, Marines and infantry on Guadalcanal fought a series of survival battles in the malarial jungle and around the grassy perimeter of Henderson Field. Most of General Vandegrift’s Marines were fresh-faced, hastily trained recruits who had enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. One of them was Paul Moore, Jr., just out of Yale College. Years later, in an interview, Moore described the making of a Marine on Guadalcanal:

  SOMEBODY TOLD ME ABOUT THE MARINE Corps. I knew so little about the Marine Corps that I thought it was just like the Navy except you had a prettier uniform. There was a young Marine Corps officer at Yale who drove around the campus with his blues on, in a convertible car with whitewall tires, and I thought he was the best thing I’d seen in a long time. I wanted to be just like him, so I enlisted in the Marine Corps.

  Moore was sent to Quantico for basic training, where, in his words, he made “a damned fool” of himself.

  I REMEMBER WRESTLING WITH A MACHINE gun, trying to take it apart. It suddenly came apart and I hit myself in the forehead and blood streamed out of my head all over the classroom. The lieutenant turned around and said, “There’s an example of a man who cannot follow orders.” No sympathy. In any case, the first marking period I was tenth from the bottom of the class of four hundred and way below qualification level for an officer.

  I went in to the lieutenant and asked him what I could do about it. He just put his head in his hands, and then shook his head and said, “Moore, you just don’t look like a Marine and you never will.” … Luckily, we went out on the rifle range shortly after, and I did very well at rifle shooting. I’d had a little bit of experience. We used to do it in the Adirondacks…. So I did pass and qualify to get my commission.

  After qualifying as a rifle platoon leader, Moore was sent to the Pacific with 5,000 other Marines in July 1942. They embarked on a converted ocean liner that Moore had recently sailed on, first class, on a European vacation. When they arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, the locals were happy to see them, but they had some concerns.

  ALL OF THEIR YOUNG MEN WERE away fighting in the [North African] desert, and to have 20,000 Marines piling into a rather old-fashioned Victorian English city, with all the young women there, I think made them a little nervous. Understandably! So we were given this very elaborate cultural lecture to deliver to our platoons about how conservative English society was. They said, “You never speak to a young woman in New Zealand, whoever she is, without being properly introduced. You don’t go out without a chaperone.” Well, we landed in New Zealand. I had duty so I didn’t get off for about an hour. By the time I walked up the main street of Wellington, every Marine had a girl on his arm.

  After a short training stint in New Zealand, Moore’s company went to the Fiji Islands for maneuvers.

  ALL, WE HAD WAS ONE OR two days in the Fiji Islands. Then we got back on board, and as we were steaming toward our next destination, they told us … our battalion was to join a Raider battalion [a battalion of Marines trained for difficult landings in the Pacific] and attack Tulagi, which was a small island across the gulf from Guadalcanal. The rest of the division disembarked on Guadalcanal.

  As we went on our way we were protected by a few destroyers and a couple of cruisers, but each morning as we got up and looked across the sea, we’d see more and more naval vessels. It was the most incredible experience, to look out at these battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruisers—this enormous fleet of I suppose a hundred ships. It seemed like a thousand. It felt like the Greeks going to Troy…. You felt totally invincible.

  There had been no attack by United States troops before this time. This was the first.

  The night before the landing … we were anxious and excited and tense. Dawn broke. We got up in the darkness and got ready to go over the side. In those days [before landing craft were equipped with metal ramps on their bows] you went down a sort of landing net, a webbing made out of stout rope which they would otherwise use to load cargo. They’d put these nets over the side and we’d use them as a rope ladder to go down into the Higgins boats … [shallow draft] wooden powerboats [manufactured by a New Orleans boatbuilder named Andrew Jackson Higgins]. Even with a fairly medium-sized sea the Higgins boat would go up and down and the ship would go up and down, and to try to get down that swaying cargo net with about eighty pounds of equipment on your hack without killing yourself or getting jammed between the Higgins boat and the ship was quite a stunt….

  When the signal was given the Navy ensign in command of the Higgins boat would take off and the boats would go in a preordained pattern toward the beach. All during this time, from dawn on, the cruisers and destroyers had been shelling the shore. We’d never seen a shot fired in anger before, and we didn’t see how any animal, much less any human being, could live under this enormous barrage.

  Although resistance was strong on Tulagi, Moore did not see any combat. After two weeks, his company was sent across Ironbottom Sound to Guadalcanal. On landing, he was told his best friend from college was one of the first Marines killed on the island.

  OUR OUTFIT WAS ON THE MOVE all the time—first we were moved over to Henderson Field, and then within a few days there was a counterattack by those Japanese who were still there, on so-called Bloody Ridge, where a Raider battalion [led by Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson] was dug in. It was the first big battle of Guadalcanal itself, and our troops resisted it, but the Japs almost broke through to Henderson Field and so our battalion was rushed up the second night to support this unit.

  One thing I noticed was the relationship between being in one place and emotional stability…. We were always on the move. We never had a chance to really make our foxhole our home. If a Marine can dig his foxhole, and dig out a little shelf for his canteen and another little shelf to put a photograph of his girlfriend on, have a little shelter of palm trees to keep the sun off, and make a little home for himself, it makes a tremendous difference to his emotional stability….

  The second night the Japanese … attacked again and we were thrown into combat, which merely amounted to holding the line against some fairly light Japanese fire…. The strange thing was that after the battle was over, one of my men flipped and went into total hysterics, screaming and yelling in the middle of the night…. I didn’t know whether a Japanese had snuck through the wire and knifed him to death or what. It turned out this guy went absolutely out of his mind….

  This kind of thing happened all the time…. I had three or four men who went crazy in my platoon, which was 15 percent … and this was true of the other platoons in my company…. And though it was not a scientific experiment, it seemed to me there was a direct relationship between this and the fact that we were moving all the time.

  After Bloody Ridge we were put into another emplacement at the other end of the line….

  I was in one of the battles at the Matanikau River. It was a jungle river about 200 yards wide where it emptied into the bay. The Matanikau was outside of our lines, and for a long time there was sort of a seesaw between the Japanese troops and our own—sometimes the Matanikau was ours, sometimes it was theirs. So from time to time troops would be sent out to try to secure the river. I went out there on patrol, coming at it from inland with our company. I was responsible for leading 700 men single file through this impenetrable jungle, with machetes and a compass…. When we got within maybe a tenth of a mile of the coast, we heard this battle going on…. Another unit had gone up the beach, tried to cross the Matanikau, and was being thrown back by the Japanese.

  Lieutenant Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller [perhaps the most renowned Marine combat leader of the war] was in charge of this operation, and his tactics were to send one platoon after another across a totally exposed sand spit which closed off one end of the river…. The order given to each of these platoons was to run across the sand spit until they were opposite the bank, wade across the river, and attack the Japanese battalion, which was
dug in with automatic weapons and hand grenades and mortars in the bank…. Well, one platoon went over and got annihilated. Another platoon went over and got annihilated. Then another. We were lined up just behind the shore, ready to go. Ours was the fifth platoon to go over, and you know, we all realized it was insane. We heard what had happened to the other platoons. But if you’re a Marine, you’re ordered across the goddamn beach and you go. So we went … zigzagging and running as best we could so that we wouldn’t be exposed, and finally we lined up along the ocean side of the sand spit, just peeking over the top, with our weapons trained on the embankment across this little river…. The intelligence was that we could wade across. Well, our two scouts went out and found the water over their heads….

  Art Beres, one of my corporals, got to the opposite bank, I remember him holding on to a root, with the bank about a foot over him, and when he turned around I saw his whole face had been shot away. Two other guys had been killed at that particular moment, and I went across to get Art…. He was swimming. But by that time I’d called for us to attack (even though we were swimming we were told to attack, so we attacked). First of all I retrieved Art …. and got him back so that he could get behind the sand spit and be protected until he could be taken to the aid station. Then I turned around to continue swimming across the river with the rest of my platoon, and I remember—this sounds absolutely impossible but it actually happened—looking up and seeing mortars and hand grenades going over my head and the water as if it were raining, with bullets striking all around us.

  CROSSING THE MATANIKAU RIVER ON GUADALCANAL (USMC).

  I guess we got almost to the opposite bank and at that point realized two or three people had been killed, two or three others wounded, and there was just no way we could do it, so I called for retreat. We … swam back, and when we got to the bank I found two men who were unconscious on the beach. I and another fellow looked to see how they were and found out both of them were dead. So we just left them there and ran back to the protection of the sand spit.

  I remember when I was leaning over trying to bring one of my men to safety seeing bullet marks in the sand around my feet and thinking, you know, if I get out of this, maybe it means I should do something special…. I don’t know … whether it’s superstition or what, but certainly I felt that I had been extremely fortunate, and that I was, in a sense, living on borrowed time, and that this was another good reason to give my life to the Lord, and it seemed that being a priest was that way.

  Four years after the war Moore was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. In 1972 he was installed as the thirteenth bishop of New York.

  WHEN I GOT BACK, I ASKED if I could see Colonel Puller, to report to him what had happened. I wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that we had retreated, but it seemed to be the necessary thing to do. Otherwise we would all have been killed and the emplacement still would not have been taken. I can still see him. He had a fat belly. He was sitting under a coconut tree…. I saluted and told him … what had happened, what i saw of the Japanese emplacement. He not only didn’t answer me, he didn’t even turn his head to speak to me. It’s as if I hadn’t been there. After a while I just left.

  We did not get across the Matanikau River at that point. We fell back to our lines on the perimeter of the airfield….

  We took off the next morning and went up again to the Matanikau River, but this time we went across way up in the headwaters where there wasn’t any resistance….

  Morale was very bad. But there was something about Marines—once we were ordered to attack we decided we damn well were going to do it…. You’re very nervous before you go in, of course, like before a football game…. But once you get in it … your psyche gets sort of numbed, and therefore you can do acts of bravery, so-called, without necessarily having to be very brave. You just do them because in the excitement of combat you see this is the thing you’re supposed to do, and you do it. It isn’t making a decision that requires an enormous amount of courage…. Also, once you get into the excitement of the action you tend to forget about being vulnerable. When the machine gun nest needed to have a hand grenade, I got up and threw the hand grenade, without timidity, though obviously it made me very vulnerable. I’m fairly tall even on my knees, and I got up and threw it, and as I threw it, got shot.

  I received the Navy Cross for that…. But it really wasn’t any great act of bravery. Some of the more extraordinary heroic actions that take place in combat, I think, are understandable. You read about them and say. “Oh my God, I would never do that!” But when you get in combat you do it without thinking too much about it. You do it automatically. And the flip side of the coin is brutality, the imperviousness to killing other people, even brutally; some of the people, I think, become sort of sadistic. Also the act of being fairly impervious to the death of your colleagues—not that you don’t regret it, and not that you aren’t trying to prevent it and care for them, but you don’t burst into tears when you see this guy you’ve worked with for a few months lying there dead. “So he’s dead. I wonder who I’ll get to replace him, to take his place on the line?”

  To get back to the Matanikau…. Although I was shot I was not unconscious. The bullet … came through my chest between two ribs, slightly shattering them, went past my heart, as the doctors later told me, when it must have been on an inbeat instead of an outbeat, and then missed my backbone as it went through the other side of my body about an inch. So it was a very close shave. … The air was going in and out of a hole in my lungs. That didn’t mean I was finished, but I thought I was dead, going to die right then…. I wasn’t breathing through my mouth but through this hole. I felt like a balloon going in and out, going pshhhh.

  I was thinking to myself: now I’m going to die. And first of all it’s rather absurd for me, considering where I came from, my early expectations of a comfortable life and all the rest, for me to be dying on a jungle island in combat as a Marine. That’s not, me….

  Shortly, a wonderful corpsman crawled up and gave me a shot of morphine, and then a couple of other people got a stretcher and started evacuating me. … At Henderson Field they had deep dugouts for the wounded. I spent the night in a dugout, then the next day I was flown out. That night I’ll never forget, because in this dugout, which I remember was about ten feet deep and about twenty feet square, the wounded were packed just like sardines, and it was terribly hot, there was bad ventilation, terrible smells, and these poor guys were yelling and screaming all night. That was a real horror story. The next morning a plane was able to get in, and they put us aboard and flew us back to Espíritu Santo, a Navy medical hospital.19

  From there, Moore was taken on the hospital ship Solace to Auckland, New Zealand.

  One problem that historians have in re-creating the past is that their readers know how it will turn out, so events often seem inevitable. But they are not. An Allied victory in World War II was not preordained; nor was an American victory at Guadalcanal. “If our ships and planes had been routed in … [the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal], if we had lost it, our troops on Guadalcanal would have been trapped as were our troops on Bataan,” Admiral Bull Halsey wrote later. “We could not have reinforced them or relieved them. Archie Vandegrift would have been our ‘Skinny’ Wainwright and the infamous Death March would have been repeated. (We later captured a document which designated the spot where the Japanese commander had planned to accept Archie’s surrender.) Unobstructed, the enemy would have driven south, cut our supply lines to New Zealand and Australia and enveloped them.”20

  Halsey and the Navy deserve much of the credit for driving the Japanese from Guadalcanal. But, in the end, it came down to the men in the mud. They fought two enemies: the jungle and the Japanese. In that unfathomable jungle, a friend of Paul Moore’s was shot by one of his own men when his part of the line got lost and doubled back without realizing it. In total darkness, the men would hear “strange jungle noises for the first time,” Moore recalls. “Whether these were birds squaw
king in the middle of the night or some strange reptiles or frogs, I don’t know, but we were terrified by any noise whatsoever because we’d been told that the Japanese signaled each other in the jungle by imitating bird calls. So we knew we were being surrounded by them, and once in a while our men would fire. We lost two or three men in the company by that kind of tragic mistake.”21

  Other companies suffered losses under similar circumstances. “We were not fully prepared for the mysteries of those jungles,” says Guadalcanal veteran Major Carl W. Hoffman.

  The enemy was the other surprise. Before the war, “our instructors … used to joke about the fact that the [near-sighted] Japanese couldn’t hit anything on the rifle range,” Hoffman remembers. “When we got [to Guadalcanal] we realized that we’d been too quick to write off these little men.” They were “courageous, bright, and tenacious … and [they] could fire [their] weapons pretty well.”22

  The New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin, who arrived late in the campaign, wrote with grudging respect for the enemy. “The Japanese are full of tricks, deceit and cunning; the unorthodox is their rule. Hard, ruthless, brave, well-equipped, they are the best jungle-fighters in the world.